This is quite an interesting tale

Your original post reminds me of the fine British documentary series from the late 1970s Connections.

Each episode dealt with a piece of modern technology, but started way back hundreds or thousands of years ago, tracing all of the discoveries and
inventions through history that were required to make that one modern piece of technology.

It's was a great documentary series. I think they are still on, with newer episodes, but the old original episodes are by far the best.

This idea of why railroads are the gauge that they are is exactly like the type of thing this series explored.

Here are a couple of the episodes:

And a Link to all 10 original episodes on YouTube:

edit on 8/17/2013 by Soylent Green Is People because: (no reason given)

edit on 8/17/2013 by Soylent Green Is People because:
(no reason given)

ah good story. Funny how everything is all just one long line going back into perpetuity and eternity of something else, we have become so accustomed
to certain things and doing certain things in certain ways that we just are not aware of just how weird and bizarre they are. Most if not all of the
things we do everything from roads to customs and holidays if you trace them back far enough are so bizzare that it just makes you go WTF! Really?

So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads
in Europe (including Scotland ) for their legions.
Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts,
Which everyone else had to match
for fear of destroying their wagon wheels..

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome ,
they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge
of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.Bureaucracies live
forever....

A very cool story on the surface, but unfortunately it may not be totally accurate, especially with regards to the claim about the "Roman War
Chariot"

According to quite a few sources- Rome didn't use chariots for war, at all. They only used them for more ceremonial type events and mostly, chariot
racing.

But your story has been debunked it seems.

How ever the 4 foot 8-1/2 inch track gauge happened, it’s clear that the Roman
military specification for “Chariots, War, Two-Horse” had nothing to do with it. While
many things “standardized” today were first documented in either military or federal
specifications – four-inch spacing of faucet’s for lavatories, standard sizes for floor tiles,
rules for statistical sampling – someone else gets credit for track gauge spacing. Many
believe that once an urban legend makes it to the Internet, it can never be undone.
Perhaps. But we in the standards community have a reputation for requiring data to
support contentions, and then challenging the data. So challenge the legend – when
confronted with the chariot story, email back the truth. Just maybe we can knock this one
legend off the tracks – whatever gauge they may be.

I think someone else has already addressed this, but here's an extra wee bit of info. There's no written record of it, but there is an oral
tradition that claims Pontius Pilate (of Jesus fame) was born in a village called Fortingall, Perthshire, Scotland. Fortingall also has possibly the
oldest tree in Europe, a very old Yew tree.

Ouch! Ditto that. One day that just may lead into become a religion or a social measurement tool, who knows a whole host of governing techniques may
arise from it. Go figure eh? Stranger things have happened.

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